as in the days of the Decameron—­here Baudelaire made what might be called his historic impression upon literature.  He was at that time twenty-eight years of age; and even in that assemblage, in those surroundings, his personality was striking.  His black hair, worn close to the head, grew in regular scallops over a forehead of dazzling whiteness; his eyes, the color of Spanish tobacco, were spiritual, deep, penetrating, perhaps too insistently so, in expression; the mobile sinuous mouth had the ironical voluptuous lips that Leonardo da Vinci loved to paint; the nose was delicate and sensitive, with quivering nostrils; a deep dimple accentuated the chin; the bluish-black tint of the shaven skin, softened with rice-powder, contrasted with the clear rose and white of the upper part of his cheeks.  Always dressed with meticulous neatness and simplicity, following English rather than French taste; in manner punctiliously observant of the strictest conventionality, scrupulously, even excessively polite; in talk measuring his phrases, using only the most select terms, and pronouncing certain words as if the sound itself possessed a certain subtle, mystical value,—­throwing his voice into capitals and italics;—­in contrast with the dress and manners about him, he, according to Gautier, looked like a dandy who had strayed into Bohemia.

The contrast was no less violent between Baudelaire’s form and the substance of his conversation.  With a simple, natural, and perfectly impartial manner, as if he were conveying commonplace information about every-day life, he would advance some axiom monstrously Satanic, or sustain, with the utmost grace and coolness, some mathematical extravagance in the way of a theory.  And no one could so inflexibly push a paradox to the uttermost limits, regardless of consequences to received notions of morality or religion; always employing the most rigorous methods of logic and reason.  His wit was found to lie neither in words nor thoughts, but in the peculiar standpoint from which he regarded things, a standpoint which altered their outlines,—­like those of objects looked down upon from a bird’s flight, or looked up to on a ceiling.  In this way, to continue the exposition of Gautier, Baudelaire saw relations inappreciable to others, whose logical bizarrerie was startling.

His first productions were critical articles for the Parisian journals; articles that at the time passed unperceived, but which to-day furnish perhaps the best evidences of that keen artistic insight and foresight of the poet, which was at once his greatest good and evil genius.  In 1856 appeared his translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe; a translation which may be said to have naturalized Poe in French literature, where he has played a role curiously like that of Baudelaire in Poe’s native literature.  The natural predisposition of Baudelaire, which fitted him to be the French interpreter of Poe, rendered him also peculiarly sensitive to Poe’s mysteriously subtle